First published in the Jewish Chronicle, September 5 2003.


The Hutton inquiry into the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly has apparently become the most popular of all political websites. Well, you might scoff, that’s about as surprising as discovering that the kiddush is more popular than the Shabbat sermon.

But the Hutton website is particularly remarkable because of the way it is subverting the media. If you read every day’s full postings, and then read – and listen to – the media coverage of that evidence, it’s like stepping in front of a distorting mirror.

For this inquiry into the apparently deadly effects of spin is itself being spun daily by the media. They cherry-pick the proceedings to further their own agenda, whether this is to attack the government or the BBC. Accordingly they downplay, omit or even misrepresent the evidence which doesn’t fit their particular cause.

But the huge amount of actual evidence is painting a far more complex, subtle and yet ultimately still baffling picture. The BBC preferred to pose as heroic defenders of a political Alamo than fulfil its prime duty to tell the truth. The government was in its turn obsessive, manipulative, slippery and ruthless. Dr Kelly was used first by the BBC as a weapon against the government and then by the government as a weapon against the BBC. And yet a mystery remains. Despite the undoubted pressure from being hung out to dry by all and sundry, is this really enough to make a man kill himself?

These complexities, however, are as nothing to those who are determined to use the fate of Dr Kelly as a stick to beat up those who supported the war against Saddam. The continuing attacks in Iraq and the non-discovery of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) provide fertile ground for a big lie. This is that we went to war because the government exaggerated the threat from Iraq as immediate, telling us falsely that Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

Leave aside the fact that intelligence officials are emphatic that they believed this 45 minute claim to be true. The idea that we went to war to avert an immediate threat is a rewriting of history. The government scarcely mentioned the 45 minute claim. The burden of its case was that the combination of Saddam’s ongoing WMD programme, his association with terrorism and flouting of binding UN resolutions amounted to a threat that had to be removed.

The problem was that the public didn’t agree. Hence the government’s dubious pressure on the intelligence service for stronger material.

But what is clear from the Hutton website is that the case for war was justified. An intelligence document last September stated that Saddam ‘had chemical and biological weapons’ and was ‘able to make more’, that he was continuing to ‘work on developing nuclear weapons’, and possessed ‘ballistic missiles able to reach Israel and the Gulf states’.

And Dr Kelly himself was a fervent supporter of the war. His sister told the inquiry that he had persuaded sceptical members of his family that there was no alternative to military action to disarm Iraq. And subsequently he was certain that the missing WMD had been hidden.

There was no option but to have disarmed Saddam by force. Now there is no option but to see the thing through. The US has failed to understand that the war in Iraq has not ended. The surrounding Arab and Muslim tyrannies have every interest in preventing a democratic and peaceful Iraq, as they have in preventing a resolution of the Palestinian impasse. If the US is to win in a place it rightly perceived to be pivotal, it has to produce far more money, more troops and a far tougher attitude towards the terror puppeteers in Iran and Syria pulling the strings simultaneously from Iraq to Gaza.

If the US fails to raise its game, the war on terror is lost. But there are many in Britain who earnestly want it to lose, because they believe the real problem lies elsewhere.

I recently had an encounter with a distinguished and influential military expert who sought to persuade me of the error of my ways in supporting the war against Saddam. After a few skirmishes, he said we were skating round the real issue. Oh yes, I said, and what was that? The real cause of terror, he said, was Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to have their state.

I gently tried to remind him of a few salient historical facts about the Middle East conflict. Don’t tell me this nonsense, he said with Olympian disdain; I was there, serving in the Palestine police in 1947 and I saw it all first hand. The fact is that the creation of Israel was a terrible mistake.

Ah yes, the real issue indeed; the issue at the very core of this whole rotten appeasement culture, of which the Kelly affair is such a potent and tragic emblem.

Posted by tom at September 5, 2003